I run this website for my dad which pulls tweets from his twitter feed and displays them in an alternative format. Currently, the tweets are pulled using javascript so entirely client-side. Is the most efficient way of doing things? The website has next to no hit rate but I'm just interested in what would be the best way to scale it. Any advice would be great. I'm also thinking of including articles in the stream at some point. What would be the best way to implement that?

I run this website for my dad which pulls tweets from his twitter feed and displays them in an alternative format. Currently, the tweets are pulled using javascript so entirely client-side. Is the most efficient way of doing things? The website has next to no hit rate but I'm just interested in what would be the best way to scale it. Any advice would be great. I'm also thinking of including articles in the stream at some point. What would be the best way to implement that?

• php
• javascript
• client-side
• server-side

6 Answers 6

Twitter API requests are rate limited to 150 an hour. If your page is requested more than that, you will get an error from the Twitter API (an HTTP 400 error). Therefore, it is probably a better idea to request the tweets on the server and cache the response for a certain period of time. You could request the latest tweets up to 150 times an hour, and any time your page is requested it receives the cached tweets from your server side script, rather than calling the API directly.

From the Twitter docs:

Unauthenticated calls are permitted 150 requests per hour. Unauthenticated calls are measured against the public facing IP of the server or device making the request.

I recently did some work integrating with the Twitter API in exactly the same way you have. We ended up hitting the rate limit very quickly, even just while testing the app. That app does now cache tweets at the server, and updates the cache a few times every hour.

I would remend using client-side to call the Twitter API. Avoid calling your server. The only downfall to using client-side js is that you cannot control whether or not the viewer will have js deactivated.

What kind of article did you want to include in the stream? Like blog posts directly on your website or external articles?

By pulling the tweets server side, you're routing all tweet traffic through your server. So, all your traffic is then ing from your server, potentially causing a decrease in the performance of your website.

If you don't do any magic stuff with those tweets that aren't possible client side, I should stick with your current solution. Nothing wrong with it and it scales tremendously (assuming that you don't outperform Twitter's servers of course ;))

Pulling your tweets from the client side is definitely better in terms of scalability. I don't understand what you are looking for in your second question about adding articles

I think if you can do them client side go for it! It pushes the bandwith usage to the browser. Less load on your server. I think it is scalable too. As long as your client can make a web request they can display your site! doesn't get any easier than that! Your server will never be a bottle neck to them!

If you can get articles through an api i would stick to the current setup keep everythign client side.

For really low demand stuff like that, it's really not going to matter a whole lot. If you have a large number of tasks per user then you might want to consider server side. If you have a large number of users, and only a few tasks (tweets to be pulled in or whatever) per user, client side AJAX is probably the way to go. As far as your including of articles, I'd probably go server side there because of the size of the data you'll be working with..